Chicago’s less-than-favorite son could rise in Japan

 

    A dozen years ago, through a chain of circumstance too convoluted to relate, the U.S. government invited me to London to speak about Chicago at the Royal Festival Hall.
     Of course there had to be a welcoming reception at Winfield House, the Regent’s Park home of the American ambassador, a mansion whose 12-acre private grounds are the second largest in London, behind only Buckingham Palace. At one point in the evening, I found myself being given a tour of the mansion by Ambassador Lou Susman, a Chicago Citicorp executive who greased his slide into diplomacy by vigorous fundraising for the Democratic Party. His wife had decorated the vast Neo-Georgian interior with their collection of stark modern paintings. Rather jarringly, in my opinion, though I kept that to myself.
     “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and go to take a ....” umm, visit to the bathroom, Susman said. “And I look around and I think: ‘I’m just a Jewish kid from Pittsburgh.”
     That sense of awe at one’s lofty station in life is part of the appeal of ambassadorship. Susman certainly wasn’t rhapsodizing the joys of navigating Anglo-American relations, which began, remember, in revolution, include such dubious low points as the British burning the White House and America standing by while Hitler battered England. The 21st has gotten off to a rocky start, with both populations effectively joining hands and hurling ourselves off the cliff of nationalism and folly, Great Britain with Brexit, and America with you-know-who.
     The prospect of Rahm Emanuel becoming ambassador to Japan has gathered some attention — it was asked about at a White House press briefing on Thursday. Still, it might not happen — neither Emanuel nor the White House will confirm reports. Maybe it’s one of those famous trial balloons. Perhaps Rahm is jealous of the sickeningly sweet puff piece the New Yorker ran a few weeks ago about his brother, Ari, and ginned up some fictive good press of his own.
     Still, an apt time to ponder the question of why Rahm would be dispatched to Japan.

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Good riddance to blue and pink elephant

In addition to being too hot, too cold, too bright and too loud, the Thompson Center clashes terribly with its neighbors, such as City Hall, seen to the right in this unretouched photo.

     Timing is crucial in journalism. The story that explodes in your hand today might be a distant pop on the horizon if lobbed tomorrow. We saw that with the Adam Toledo case, where Eric Zorn was the first off the landing craft, offering a thoughtful, dispassionate column written just before the video became public, only to be cut apart in the crossfire on Twitter. Two weeks later, Mark Brown hit the ground with a column defending the police officer that was even stronger, and whistled his way up the semi-secured beach. It's the difference between jamming your hand into a wasp's nest in June and doing so in January.  Same hand, same jam, the only difference being the key presence or absence of wasps.
     With the State of Illinois putting the Thompson Center on the block last week, on Saturday I licked my chops and set aside my English muffin expose. I've long looked askance at the salmon-and-blue monstrosity, and began whetting my knife and hacking the topic into tasty chunks, a process I completed Sunday morning, turning it in about 10 a.m. with a self-satisfied smirk.  I felt a little frisson of guilt for vivisecting the man along with his work, but Helmut Jahn is a big boy, I thought. He could take it. 

    Actually, he couldn't. Not anymore. My editor, who begins her days scanning the actual news, replied, in essence. "Ummm, maybe you should factor in that Jahn died yesterday afternoon in a bike accident."
     Ah. Did not know that. No column was ever yanked back quicker or with more gratitude. I took a breath, spun around 180 degrees, and wrote the tribute that ran in Monday's paper—also sincere, working in some of the same criticisms, but with the head-bowed gravity the moment demanded. If you haven't read that, do so, and compare the tone with this, the original column that got yanked back; now, 96 hours later, I feel semi-comfortable sharing it here, after a respectful interval and in the more limited confines of the blog, without the imprimatur of the paper. 

     Besides, with Jahn's death throwing fuel on the dying embers of efforts to save the Thompson Center—I'm not sure how that changes anything—it is even more timely to outline the case for taking it down and putting a proper building in its place.  

     This is unsettling. The Thompson Center, that is. Not because it is for sale and probably will be torn down. Good riddance to bad design.
     A few murmurs of dissent from sentimentalists. The Thompson Center is architecturally redundant, since its model, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, whose 22-story lobby ... choosing my words carefully...inspired Helmut Jahn to create his star-crossed homage, is right where it has been since 1967 and not going anywhere.. No need to grieve over a knock-off when the original still stands.
     The hunchbacked beast of a building never fell from favor, since it was one of those rare structures despised from the start.
     “It’s obscene,” Chicago architect Harry Weese said at its 1985 unveiling. “It won’t even make a beautiful ruin.”
     True that. But it did make a quick one. Within a year, its shoddy outdoor pillars, obviously not intended to be touched by human hands, were already “dented, scraped and smudged.”
     Even the workmen who built the Thompson Center hated the thing. “This is an ugly building” one scrawled in graffiti, 17 stories up.
     So the building going bye-bye isn’t what irks me. That’s a good thing. What bothers me is that its demise will mean that my career has bracketed the building. You start to feel old when you outlast public buildings, particularly one 25 years younger than yourself. When the State of Illinois Center, as it was originally called, was built, I was a hustling young reporter. One of the few people who actually gazed upon the Ice Cube—prominent among the SOIC’s raft of design flaws was this Rube Goldberg system that formed ice at night, when the electricity rates are low, and then blew air over the ice, cooling the building. In theory.
     In unforgiving reality, the contraption never worked, particularly since the glass curtain wall served as a greenhouse—to Jahn’s surprise, apparently, though how he managed to fail to consider that blazing object in the sky is a mystery. Ignoring the sun, like ignoring gravity, is not the hallmark of great architecture. There was talk of special glass that was supposed to be installed but proved too costly and was jettisoned. The heat overwhelmed the cooling system, requiring them to both cover the inferior glass with jury-rigged anti-sun sheeting and retrofit in a normal air conditioner. And that was only the beginning. I could fill the column with problems. You couldn’t turn off the lights—programmed by computers, supposedly “energy-efficient,” they left tenants who wanted to dim their offices, say to project slides, to tape black paper over the light fixtures.
     To be fair, there was unquestionable pride in the early years. I would march visitors into the SOIC, shout “Tah-dah!” and we’d just stand there, open-mouthed, watching the glass elevators go up and down—yet another flaw, since so many tourists would jam the elevators that employees couldn’t get to work. And of course, we had the luxury of gawping then leaving. “Scandalously short on user comfort,” is how Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp politely put it. Too hot, too cold, too loud. When the frequent public events were going on below, one state employee said it “sounded like a basketball game was going on outside my office,”
     And that was before the state, in a penny-wise-pound-foolish public display of false economy, allowed the whole thing to decay and deteriorate into a grubby, crumbling mess, so bad that—and I saw this with my own eyes—the carpet in the governor’s office was repaired with duct tape. As were the broken tiles in the plaza outside. When Gov. Pritzker said it would take $375 million just to clean and repair the place, nobody even blinked at the figure. Sounds right.
     There is one argument for its preservation that I feel duty-bound to float. You could view the Thompson Center as a crime scene, making the building itself evidence. Before the wrecking ball takes the Thompson Center down, we could have the show trial right there in the yawning lobby, the way its namesake held public hearings there for accused rapist Gary Dotson (to this day the most memorable moment in the buildings 36 year history, itself reason aplenty to take it down). Think of the drama, setting up a courtroom where the grids of cheap sunglasses and chola hats are usually on sale, next to the big static displays from the DMV and the Treasurer’s Office. There would be Helmut Jahn in the dock, scowling fiercely, in chains. After the evidence is provided, and inevitable guilt concluded, I would feel comfortable arguing for mitigation. Yes, Jahn was 40 when it was unveiled, but that’s babyhood for architects. We could write it off as youthful indiscretion, committed at a time when big hair and padded shoulders eroded our aesthetic reason. The Thompson Center atrocity is mitigated by Jahn’s subsequent good works: Terminal One at O’Hare, the Mansueto Library at University of Chicago. A simple apology would do. Not that this is possible—Jahn has already cheekily written a treatise explaining how he would like to retrofit, yet again, the disaster he inflicted on the city.
     Here’s a thought. If you design a building whose workers had to set up fans and umbrellas seeking relief from the sun cruelly blazing through the giant magnifying glass you put over their heads, at least have the dignity to just shut up and let exasperated Chicagoans finally give your folly the bum’s rush it deserves.

Opening up world of Bays English Muffins

   

     English muffins fly under the radar. I’m not sure why. Maybe because they are denizens of the morning, generally, among the first foodstuffs we confront in that awkward hour between sleep and work. Maybe because English muffins are humble, stolid, reliable.
     And therefore unsung. Chicagoans can prattle on about pizza, harangue endlessly over hot dogs, even occasionally acknowledge that Chicago is, or was, the center of the candy universe, turning out everything from Baby Ruth bars to Lemonheads.
     But English muffins are denied their due.
     I’ve just searched the Sun-Times going back to 1948, and the Tribune and Daily News back even further, and found only a handful of stories mentioning that George Bay set to baking his grandmother’s English muffin recipe here in 1933, delivering his circular delights in paper bags to Loop hotels and restaurants.
     Which bugs me since, most mornings—say five out of every seven—start with a toasted Bays English muffin, preferably Cinnamon Raisin, and a whole grapefruit, peeled and sectioned, using bites of the former as a reward for getting down segments the latter. It’s not that I don’t like grapefruit, I do, exceedingly. But next to an English muffin ... well, that’s like comparing a carrot with a brownie.
     You would think the world of English muffins is fairly static, and it is. But about six months ago, there was an earthquake: Bays introduced resealable packaging, with a big window that opens and closes, like Oreo cookie packages. Previously opening an orange and white package of Bays required both ingenuity and effort. The packages were not bread bags, which could be opened and closed with a twist tie. But cellophane—perhaps a hold-over to when Bays introduced cellophane-windowed boxes in 1938. Try tearing one open and you’d end up ripping a gash halfway across the package, exposing your delicate muffins to the cruel refrigerator air. A rend I’ve repaired with Scotch tape. Trying to avoid this, I took to carefully cutting the end off with scissors and then covering the opening with a baggie, using that as a cap for the next three muffins, then transferring the last two muffins into the baggie.
     Bays is proud of this new packaging. “NOW RESEALABLE” a sticker proclaims. As well they should; a big improvement, and I couldn’t help but imagine, as the mornings ran on, the unheralded moment of epiphany: some humble employee, deep within the vast Bays English Muffin operation, stepping into the path of a higher up. “M...M...Mr. Bay, I’m sorry, I can hold my silence no longer. These cellophane packages are ... a nuisance. Here, I’ve been working on this improved packaging system, in my spare time of course....”
     Unheralded ... unless I could find him. Or her.
     “It started with our consumers,” said Jill Matthews, director of marketing, innovation and strategy for Bays, no longer family owned but since 2017 a division of Grupo Bimbo. “We are so grateful to have a very loyal base of longtime Bays fans. They’ve been in love with our Bays English muffins for years, but not our packaging. This was a frequent consumer complain, that once they opened Bays they had to repackage Bays in another container. Otherwise, high-quality Bays English muffins could not be stored properly.”
     Alas, she did not serve up an individual hero to enjoy the limelight.
     “The Bays team mobilized to stop this pain point,” she said. “We wanted to find the right options. How big should the reseal be? We wanted people to easily get their muffins out of the package. The reseal had to work properly. It really was a process, to find the right solution.”

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Mailbox Number 11

    Perhaps it is the fate of children to be always looked upon as children by their parents, even when they are long grown. I have graduated college, written nine books, purchased two homes, poured concrete, installed light fixtures, changed car tires, driven from the West Coast to the East Coast. I can do things. I function as an independent adult in the living world. 

     And yet...

     Have you ever turned the dishwasher on without putting dishwashing detergent in it? I haven't. Though I suppose it is possible. In fact, it must happen to someone, sometime. But in decades of doing the dishes, it's never happened to me, to my knowledge. Nor have I ever worried about doing so. In the days when you had to pour harsh granules of detergent into a little cup, I poured. In recent decades I grabbed whatever tablet or pod—long a complicated packet of liquids of various hues—and dropped it into its little compartment and slid the small plastic door home. 

      It's really not that hard. I can't imagine it being a concern. Until last week, visiting my parents in Colorado. The dishwasher hummed in the background.
     "Did you put the dishwasher on?" my mother asked after breakfast.
     "Yes," I said.
     "Did you put soap in it?" she asked.
     I gazed at her, steadily. Ever see those Time/Life photos of a boron laser cutting through steel plate? I thought of that photo at that moment, imagining my expression as something like that. Though in reality I might merely have looked cross. She asked the question again.
     "Ma, I'm 60 years old," I said.
     "I think of you as half your age," she said, sweetly.
     "That would make me 30," I said, flatly. Still an adult. I don't know why I enter into these exchanges. The child in me, I suppose. I never come out the winner. The next day, after more pressing than should have been necessary, I was finally entrusted with the mailbox key and allowed to go get the mail. Which I did, managing to walk to the mailbox, briskly, insert the key, on my first try, turn it in the proper direction, remove the mail, carry the small stack back to her condo without dropping a single letter. I placed it on the kitchen counter, right where the mail goes. 

     I do not believe that, even with the previous foreshadowing, 100 novelists could come up wth the perfect, inevitable question that was tossed at me at the moment. Pause now, and try to imagine it. Do you have a contender in mind? Compare it to the glory of what my mother crafted:

     "Any trouble finding it?"
     My parents have live in the same townhouse for 33 years. Walk out the front door, turn right, take 75 steps, and there are the mailboxes. They're like the Rockies, right there. It's hard to miss them.
     I considered my reply, carefully, and settled on my default, candor.
     "The mailbox?" I said, more in sorrow than anger. "No."

     The conversation did not end there.
     "I mean Number 11," she replied.
     I marveled, the way one would at a volcano or the Northern Lights.
     "Right there between 10 and 12," I said, surrendering to the moment, almost happy.

Helmut Jahn left his mark on Chicago

 

     For many years, if you stood in Helmut Jahn’s office at 35 E. Wacker and looked out the window, you were confronted with the ugliest building in Chicago: the Sun-Times’ home at 401 N. Wabash, a squat, trapezoidal relic that, next to the Venetian splendor of the Wrigley Building, looked like an overturned gray galvanized metal tub set beside a spun sugar ivory Victorian wedding cake.
     Perhaps to block that view, Jahn kept in the window a model of the latest version of his sailing sloop, Flash Gordon, which won the Chicago to Mackinac Race in 1995. Its presence was a violation of his own edict not to keep “personal things” at work; the reverse being true at his home, which was free from images of the stunning buildings he created around the world during his long career.
     “A place for each,” he told me, when I stopped by Murphy/Jahn for a visit, years ago. Born in Nuremberg, he had a fierce devotion to order, both a very German and very architectural quality: all of his paper clips were red, his push pins gray.
     Jahn didn’t hang around the office much anyway, spending half his time on the road, traveling the world, building dramatic structures in China, Thailand, Qatar, Germany, Poland.
     His main gift to Chicago was the much-loved, much-hated Thompson Center. “Modern Masterpiece or Blue Turkey?” the Wall Street Journal asked when it opened in May 1985, and of course the correct answer is “both.” The soaring 17-story lobby, inspired by the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, was a must-see for Chicago tourists who gawked at its soaring blue and salmon enclosed space.
     They also jammed the glass elevators, making it hard for state workers to get to their offices, one of a number of design flaws that made working there a challenge, particularly the greenhouse effect of that curved whale of glass that had sweltering state employees putting fans on their desks and cowering under umbrellas to protect them from the sun.
     “It’s obscene,” Chicago architect Harry Weese said at the time, one of countless criticisms fired at Jahn, who never gave up on his vision. Just last year, he came up with a plan to save the Thompson Center, repurposing it as a kind of enclosed urban forest.

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Patient with patience

Patience, 1540 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "You're smart, practical, patient," I said.
     "I'm patient?" she laughed, dubious.
     "Well, you're not impatient..."
     "Isn't that a flower?"
     Almost. Impatiens, with an "s" instead of a "t." A common East African plant of the balsam family, flowering in a thousand different ways, some resembling poppies, at least to my eye. Which left me musing on the word, patience. What is the connection between the regrettable discomfort with the pace of events and the flower? Perhaps it blooms early. And how do patient, the calmness in waiting, and patient, the convalescent, connect? They have to share the quality of time, right? Patients being people who wait to heal, patiently.

    Or so went my theory.
    Off to find out with the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines patient as "1. Bearing or enduring (pain, affliction, trouble, or evil of any kind) with composure, from the Latin pati, 'to suffer.'" 

     It might be a comment on the relative comfort of modern life in general and mine in particular that I would focus on the time and not the suffering. The word shows up in the early 1300s in both senses, as forbearance and a person under medical care, the latter at the end of the century in Chaucer.
     Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defines "impatience" as "uneasiness under pain or suffering" and makes this point: "Impatience is not rage, nor absolute inability to bear pain; but it implies want of fortitude, or of its exercise. It usually springs from irritability of temper." A theme he elaborates under "impatience"—"We are all apt to be impatient under wrongs; but it is a christian duty not to be impatient in sickness, or under any afflictive dispensation of Providence." The lowercase, I rush to point out, is his. As for the faith's current abandonment of forbearance for constant complaint over harms more perceived than real, well, no need to ballyhoo the obvious.   
      Samuel Johnson offers up a number of worthwhile quotes, including this, from Pope: "Fame, impatient of extremes, decays/Not more by envy than excess of praise." Yup, lot of that too.

Impatiens walleriana

      Oddly, my OED doesn't have "impatiens" in it. Nor the supplements The online Merriam-Webster traces the word to the Latin. Pati is to suffer, but patiens is the nominative for bear or endure (so impatiens is the inability to do so) and suggests its from the tendency to discharge their seed pods at touch, tracing the word to the relative yesterday of 1785. No wonder that two centuries later the OED hadn't yet let it into the charmed circle.

     Ah well, a deadline awaits, speaking of impatient, and the celebration of Mother's Day. I didn't plan a discussion of patience to fall today, just a happy accident, as motherhood and patience are often synonyms, except of course when they're not. 

Texas notes: Severed

     Soon to be Ex-Austin-Bureau-Chief Caren Jeskey shares her journey home to Chicago.

     Skeeter Sims. Mule Clark. Hoot Owl Hatcher. Turkey Beckham. Baby Beef Chandler. I stepped gingerly around faded Texas stars emblazoned into a sidewalk in Cooper, Texas. As I read the names memorialized in the middle of each concrete star, I thought “how beautiful. This town really loves their animals.” Then something inside of me (I hear her a lot these days, my inner intuitive voice) spoke up and said “Those are the names of people.” I was touched. Imagine your name preserved into a sidewalk of the town where you lived. What an honor.

     I did not know why these particular names were chosen. Were they veterans? I surmised that my question would be answered when I got to the starting point of the display. I made my way down, photographing each and every name since they were all too good to be true. Foxy Roan. Pig Choate. Bat Poteet.   

     But no. All I got was a marker for a Miller’s Pharmacy, and more names. I learned that Goebel Templeton was from the nearby town of Charleston. He seemed well loved and had extra signage. Hubster Doctor Lawyer Teacher Preacher From The Holy Land. He’s someone I might have liked to meet. We could have sat down and had a soda or a whiskey and cigar on a bench near a cobblestone street. I could have listened to his story and marveled that his life was so different than mine, even though we are both “American.”
     I’ve learned in my time here in the Country of Texas that people are more like snowflakes—in a good, individualistic way—than I ever knew before. I have a soft spot in my heart for almost everyone I’ve met, especially countless seniors I spent time with along the way in the hospitals where I worked. There was the man who wanted to set me up with an oil guy. That was before he got pissed at the doctor and went to his truck to get his shotgun. The crisis was averted with the help of local law enforcement, thank goodness. What I will remember about him, more than the threat of feudal violence he displayed, was the time he recited a poem he’d written for his wife when she was 12 years old. At the time of this reading she was in her late 80s without much mental capacity left. As he recited the poem she sat up in her bed & came to life. She murmured the words she could remember along with him, and we all cried. (I won’t get into the fact that I was disciplined for crying at work when a stone-faced bitchy nurse reported my “lack of professionalism.”)

    I reached out to the host on the ranch I am staying on to ask about the names. “They are people who have animal names that have lived in the community. Wolfe Lowery is my husband’s uncle.” Goebel may not be an animal name per se, but it’s the name of a company that makes animal figurines. I am starting to get it.
     As I researched more about Mr. G, I learned that a 500-pound meteorite fell to this part of the earth during the passage of Halley's Comet, bringing some publicity to the community of Charleston in May of 1910, 111 years ago. Mr. G would have been about 3 years old at that time. How did that affect his life? What did his folks think about this comet that fell from the sky?
     It’s not lost on me that I am in the land of flat-earthing non-masking Ted Cruz-loving folks. Did they think the Lord sent the comet for a reason? This land is my land, this land is your land. Staunch Pentecostals and atheists alike are invited! So here I am, exploring this land that belongs as much to me (well, the public lands and thoroughfares I traverse, and sometimes the places I rent) as it does to anyone else. My mind is being blown over and over again in the Big Star State that I am going to leave behind later today.

     So far on this jaunt in Cooper, I got spooked by a horse who was probably more scared than me. I met teens fishing for crappie who’ve never been out of East Texas, the same horse doesn’t like cucumbers and spat the one I offered him back out to me, opting for flowering clover instead, and I almost stepped on a severed drum head. I huddled and quaked under blankets and pillows the other night while 87 mph winds raced across the plains and lightening was continuous. I was terrified. Friends in Louisiana and California followed the radar and texted me with advice and comforting words during the tornado watch, until it passed.
     Tomorrow I will go find the tiny house community I was told about today, and perhaps visit another small town to learn of its charm. Yes, this is the South and I am always aware that certain people are far from being welcomed here, are far from safe, and that makes me sad. I’ll be back in Chicago soon enough where I can continue to do my part to affect social justice while enjoying my “one wild and precious life” in the words of Mary Oliver. Wishing you the same.